Thursday, December 12, 2013

The wear and tear on offshore wind farms means that within a decade we will have to pay tens of billions of pounds to replace them

It has long been obvious that by far the most delusional element in the
Government’s shambles of an energy policy is how it subordinates all else to
an obsession with building thousands of hopelessly inefficient and absurdly
oversubsidised windmills.

This is now only made worse by George Osborne’s
bid to appease his backbenchers by transferring a fraction of the 100 per
cent subsidy paid to those increasingly unpopular onshore wind
farms to the giant offshore wind farms, which already receive a 200
per cent subsidy, making such electricity as they produce six times more
expensive than that we get from coal.
It is now a year, however, since a report for the Renewable Energy Foundation
by Prof Gordon Hughes, a former senior energy adviser to the World Bank,
dropped what should have been a further huge bombshell into the energy
debate.

Flawed: the effects of weather and salt corrosion will badly hit electricity output

Photo: ALAMY

Using official data from the UK and Denmark, Prof Hughes showed that we have
now been building turbines long enough to see that, due to wear and tear on
their mechanisms and blades, the amount of electricity they generate very
dramatically falls over the years; so that a turbine that initially produces
on average at 25 per cent of its “capacity” can degrade over 15 years to
produce less than 5 per cent.

With offshore turbines, the effects of weather
and salt corrosion are so damaging that output falls from 45 per cent to
barely 12 per cent.

This means, as Prof Hughes observes, that either we will have to build many
more turbines than the Government is allowing for, to comply with our EU
requirement to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by
2020; or, within a decade, we will have to pay tens of billions of pounds
more for most of those turbines to be replaced.

I gather that Prof Hughes showed his research to David MacKay, the chief
scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, who could
not dispute his findings.

So DECC is fully aware of this devastating flaw in
its projections, but presses on with its insane policy regardless.

Links :

The Guardian : Wind turbines trash the landscape for the benefit of billionaires